Saturday, October 23, 2004

Just in case. . .

. . .you've had trouble with the internet connection, or you live under a rock and have just now gotten access, here's a link to the Wolves ad coming out and playing from now through election day in battleground states.

Definitely a classic.

Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg seems to think they should have gone with sharks instead of wolves.

My cat, The Cheat, goes him one better and says a bear holding a shark would be even more effective.

You have to wonder. . .

The tragically married. . .

. . .Michelle Malkin has a piece on Larry O'Donnell's October 22 appearance on Scarborough Country. I happened to be sitting in a local restaurant/sportsbar last night while this was playing on the screen, sans sound. You didn't even have to hear the guy to know he'd gone right 'round the bend.

I'm reminded of the months prior to the 2000 election, when Chris Matthews admitted something revealing about his generation of Democrats. In some off-the-cuff remarks concerning the level of support for John McCain, he made a statement to the effect that the liberals in the media felt compelled to support McCain due to his status as a Vietnam veteran out of some sense of guilt for the way they behaved while it was going on. I can't post a direct quote, or find any kind of transcript to verify it, but if Matthews wants to sue me, I say bring it on. I'll take the publicity.

That would explain O'Donnell's meltdown to an extent. After all, the liberals finally have themselves a bona fide Vietnam veteran running at the top of the ticket, and they feel it is their mission to get that man elected. Mr. O'Neill is standing in the way and actively working against him, and as such, stands as an obstacle to what they feel is their ultimate vindication. After all, John Kerry was there, and he came back saying the same things about the war that they were saying in their protests.

If Kerry were to win the presidency, it would signal the complete mainstreaming of the anti-war movement of the 60's and early 70's. They could finally look into the cameras and say, "For over a generation, the reality in politics has been that anti-war means 'radical'. Well, now that we have a man in the Oval Office who actively participated in anti-war activities -- a man who was also actually in Vietnam -- you can't truly say that the movement is out of the mainstream. After all, the Presidency has always been about the mainstream in politics."

The liberal media sees a John Kerry presidency as one last shot at validating everything they stand for, and the very things that drove them to pursue careers in the media to begin with.

It's not necessarily a conspiracy, per se. It's more a commonly held notion that, if they're doing their jobs, John Kerry will naturally win. Because, dammit, they're professionals, and they're paid to know the "truth". And every "truth" they uncover points to the greater need for a President John F. Kerry, for the sake of the human race.

So, put yourself in Larry O'Donnell's shoes. He's sitting there listening to a man who would undo everything he has believed in and worked for in his long media career. Wouldn't you have a meltdown of your own?

Sorry again. . .

. . .for the lack of new blog material, yesterday. I've been battling a headcold of some kind that leaves me nearly deaf in my right ear. I went through the very same thing last winter, and it seemed to last for months. It's particularly irksome because, when I'm not working at my computer, I'm usually listening to music.

Say, that reminds me. . .

If you're ever on the market for electronics, do yourself a favor and check out Ben's Bargains. There are some excellent deals on stereo and computer equipment, and there are new bargains posted everyday. And, it's not just electronics. There's a whole lot of other stuff, too. Do check it out. I'm sure you'll find something worth looking into.

Wolfgang von Skeptik. . .

. . .updates with a scoop on the very interesting story of a group of liberal Christians, Jews and Muslims in Boston, Citizens for Peace and Tolerance, dedicated to exposing jihadist elements throughout the nation. However, as his moniker implies, good news comes with a caveat.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Heads-up. . .

. . .to Ldot bloggers. In case you haven't already heard about it, Hugh Hewitt is hosting a blogger symposium on the question, "Why George W. Bush? Why Not John Kerry?" The piece I wrote below is my submission, and I'd like to encourage other Ldotters to contribute. Also, Ultima Thule has the submissions of Aussiegirl:

Fanatics who are bent on death and destruction, who murder women and children and innocent civilians and behead hapless victims while shouting "God is Great!", cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be negotiated with, they will not come to a summit or a peace conference.

John Kerry is the Chamberlain of our time. He demands that any move America makes in its defense meets some "Global Test". He lives in a pre 9/11 world that we would all dearly love to inhabit again. But wishing doesn't make it so.

and BonnieBlueFlag:

"If I were a Police Officer, I would vote for Bush, because while Kerry wouldn't cross a police picket line in Democratically secure Boston, he had no problem crossing two Florida police picket lines on his way to Orlando. The officer's contract expired Oct. 1, and they had notified Democratic official last week of the planned picket lines. Kerry aides said the picket lines were a surprise ploy of the Republican leaning Police Union.

If I were a College Student, I would vote for Bush, because the number of Pell Grants increased by 1.3 million, and there was a 60% funding increase in the past three years.

If I were a Soldier, Sailor, Marine or Airman, I would vote for Bush, because I do not want to have as my Commander in Chief a man who should have been tried for treason. I do not wish to serve under a president that would send me into war, without the equipment necessary to win and survive that war.

If any Ldotters have submissions you'd like for me to exerpt here, send a link to my email, and I'll be more than happy to do it. I'll also add you to the blogroll, if you'd like.

Bush '04 and Why

When deciding whom I'll vote for in any election, I take into account a broad range of issues, but the two biggies are self-interest and party.

I won't pretend to be an even-handed observer. I am a Republican. I'm perhaps not the most conservative Republican, but neither am I the most liberal one. I have some libertarian leanings, but not enough of them to escape being tagged as a nazi or bigot by the liberal elite. And, since that elite makes its home with the Democrats, I have absolutely no misgivings about proclaiming my membership with the GOP. And, the fact that George W. Bush calls himself a Republican earns him a lot of clout with me.

But, self-interest trumps. I could go on and on about how I feel that it's a person's duty to vote for the man who would be "good for the country" and "stands up for principles" and "identifies with people like me", but that's all just pap intended to pussyfoot around the truth: People vote in their own self-interest.

All the platitudes fall under that heading. After all, if my interest is being served, I'll live in a great and good country, where my principles are upheld, and my leaders identify with me and my circumstances. An aggressive war on terrorism, tax cuts, and conservatives on the bench are all on the list as well. And President Bush sides with me on every count.

One can fairly fault the President for mistakes in Iraq, and should be given the freedom to do so without being called a traitor, whether in the unpatriotic sense, or the partisan political sense. I'm fair-minded enough to believe that a person’s disagreement with me on this matter likely stems from his or her own lack of fair-mindedness, rather than treason. Also, I understand that everyone in this country has the right to his own opinion, and is free to express it. That goes for people who fling the word "fascist" around like the fruit in Michael Moore's Halloween bag, just as well as those who use "traitor" in the same fashion.

So, I'll state unambiguously at the outset that I don't think support for John Kerry, nor criticism of President Bush, are necessarily indicative of any lack of patriotism.

However, I do believe that to assess the current war in Iraq as a terribly mishandled SNAFU is grossly unfair, and that the only way a person could reasonably come to that conclusion is to have other, extraneous issues exerting pressures from the periphery. In the blogosphere, we've all seen the letters home, written by soldiers who are disgusted at the media coverage. Almost invariably, they list accomplishments that, taken on their own merits, would have been thought impossible within two years of invading a 30-year-entrenched tyranny -- dismantling its entire government and destroying a good bit of the infrastructure in the process.

So, there have been strides made in the cause, and they have been great ones. That's not to say there haven't been shortcomings, however. There most certainly have, and that's undeniable. But those shortcomings are easily attributable to the haste with which the President went into Iraq, and I think a reasonable person could come to the conclusion that things did happen too quickly. Where I differ with most of those critics is in just how bad a thing that haste really is in the final summation.

I think a fair assessment of the President's war timing has to take into consideration a determination to be aggressive in the GWOT, and to head off threats in as early a stage as possible. The intelligence that the President relied on, and to which there was nearly universal agreement among the other nations of the world, indicated that Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to the US and its allies. The fact that some nations preferred that the President not act on that threat does nothing to change that fact.

John Kerry made statements on the floor of the Senate, as well as in media accounts that indicate that he saw Saddam Hussein's Iraq as an immediate threat, as well. And, if you believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD (as nearly everyone did until the President decided to do something about it), and supported terrorism in any form (which he undeniably did), you could come to no other conclusion: Saddam Hussein had to be dealt with quickly and forcefully.

It was clear that some of our "traditional" allies didn't agree, and surely the President was keenly aware of that. And that seems to be the point that John Kerry has seized upon as his main criticism of the war, and one which he holds up as an indication of the "rush to war". But, the President's decision has to be judged based on the intelligence he was given, and implications of that intelligence, and the potential consequences of not reacting to it on time. That goes for any decision to go to war.

John Kerry likes to argue that the President disregarded other intelligence which showed that Saddam Hussein wasn't as great a threat as he had been portrayed, but the fact remains that every other credible intelligence agency on the planet had come to the same conclusion as those who provided the intelligence to the President. So, from that point, the question isn't the accuracy of the intelligence -- it's well established that the bulk of the world was no more accurate than we were, with regard to Iraq's WMD. The question is, "what do you do with the intelligence you have?"

The President chose to move forward and actively seek to remedy the situation with force. John Kerry voted to authorize that action, and supported it wholeheartedly, at first. Now, however, he asserts that he would have done it differently. Well, of course he would do it differently now. The WMD that we (and that includes him) all thought were there have turned out not to be there, after all.

But, that's not precisely what he's saying. In fact, what he is saying is that he would have given more weight to the intelligence that showed Hussein's Iraq to be a less a threat than the prior intelligence had indicated. And that's precisely where Kerry goes so horribly wrong. Because, according to David Kay, those minimalist estimates were even further off the mark than the President's assessment. Indeed, he stated that the threat in Iraq was even greater than previously thought.

But, even if it had turned out that Hussein's Iraq was really the toothless tiger that some still insist it was, the President is bound to act on threats, both actual and perceived. President Bush reacted to the threat he perceived exactly as he should have. That is, he moved forward and backed up his threat to use force against Saddam Hussein if he did not comply with the terms that the President so clearly laid out before the United Nations. In doing so, he established that the threat of force from the United States is a very credible one, and not to be taken lightly.

John Kerry would have us believe that, had he been privy to all of the intelligence, he would have acted more deliberately, thus saving the US from European scorn. To that end, John Kerry is hypothetically applying his global test. In fact, what he is saying is, "I will more gracefully consider the opinions of those nations who are angered by our presence in Iraq, and will be more pliable with our allies." And, that does sound nice and friendly when you accept it at face value. But, when you consider that those allies came to their conclusions based on very similar intelligence estimates, it becomes clear that: (1) our allies don't all believe that it's best to act aggressively on perceived threats, and (2) our allies aren't looking out for America's best interests.

Since France, Germany, and Russia all opposed military action despite coming to the same intelligence conclusions as the US with regard to Iraq, you have to ask just why it is that they came to such distinctly different conclusions with regard to how to deal with the problem. That's assuming, of course, that they perceived it as a problem to begin with. I'm willing to grant that assumption based on the basic, if naive, belief that nations act much like rational human beings, in that they tend to act in their own self-interests.

Since it's given that the intelligence used was essentially similar, that all believed that Saddam and WMD were a bad combination, and that all nations tend to act in their own self-interests, the only way to explain their opposition to action is that they have interests that differ from those of the US. And, that's been established beyond doubt to anyone who's heard of the Oil-for-Food scandal. (That scandal justifies the use of military force on its own merits, by the way, if ceasefire agreements and UN resolutions are of any value, whatsoever.)

The message that John Kerry is sending to anyone with a slight skepticism about international politics is that he is willing to factor the interests of other nations into the equation when solving the problem of an honestly perceived threat based on nearly universally agreed-to variables. That's an awfully long sentence to describe what America should do when faced with a threat.

President Bush did exactly as he should have done as the leader of the free world. He quickly rallied what troops he could and faced down the threat, head-on, in its own back yard. He has established that America will no longer err on the side of diplomacy when it comes to terrorism and WMD. I don't need any other reason to justify my vote for President Bush.

Wolfgang von Skeptik. . .

"I turned to the wanna-be Klansman and I said, not loudly, something to the effect of “man you got it all wrong. Look around you: there’s no blacks here. It’s not about race. The reason we’ve been here all day and we’re still waiting? It’s about gender. Gender-quotas and quota-mongering...”

The waiting room fell dead silent as the rank of normally undemonstrative bureaucrats behind the counter boiled into activity, a gallery of fat caricatures of sullen officialdom suddenly animated in their florescent-lighted frames, a coven of harpies shrieking and shouting and flapping their arms and pointing. A severely overweight supervisor buzzed open the electronically latched gate that separated her elitist preserve from the below-the-salt realm of supplicants, and she stomped toward me, dirty white sneakers yelping on the grimy beige linoleum floor, halting so close I could smell her: cloying flower-scented deodorant overpowered by female armpit sweat, cigarettes and cheap shampoo. “You!” she snarled; “You shut up. I don’t give a damn how many buses you’ve missed or how far you’ve got to walk, you shut your mouth. You EVER say anything like that again, you WILL go to jail. You got that? You understand?” She glared down at me, cheeks red with rage, gray eyes pitiless as winter skies, short straight mousy brown hair tumbling from where she had tucked it behind her unadorned ears.

“Yes ma’am,” I said."

Whether or not this is a typical experience (and mine was, admittedly, different), it certainly makes for absorbing, compelling reading, and enumerates plenty of reasons to fear Kerry's plans for America's healthcare system.

Unproblematic analogies. . .

. . .are very hard to come by. But, that's what Andrew insists upon in today's craven defense of the Kerry utterance.

"So I rest my case. I await an analogy that is not inherently distasteful or problematic that would render Kerry's remark out of bounds."

I'm still waiting on the same thing with regard to equating the gay rights movement to that of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50's and 60's. Because there is indeed a vast difference.

Gays insist that the only thing that makes them different from the rest of society is their sex lives, and they feel that their plight is analogous to blacks being disenfranchised in the South. There has never been a more rough analogy in the history of public debate. After all, there is no official system in place to prevent gays from voting. There are no gay and straight water fountains. Gays sit wherever they want on buses.

Gays aren't barred from eating at lunch counters. Quite the contrary, gays eat in fine restaurants all the time, and in fact are their owners in many cases.

So, gays can't talk about their sex lives to strangers on a bus, even though straight people do it all the time. That's a far cry from not being allowed to sit down to a peaceful meal in a restaurant without being relegated to the seats by the bathroom door.

Monday, October 18, 2004

When all else fails. . .

. . .change the terms of the debate. That's what appears to be happening over at Andrew Sullivan's blog. Suddenly, the question isn't whether or not Kerry engaged in any gay-baiting. Rather, the question is whether any leading Republican has expressed any outrage over previous instances when committed by Republicans.

Whatever the answer, I don't see how it impacts on the Kerry question. I mean, either Kerry deliberately used Mary Cheney as a political wedge, or he didn't. But, if side questions are to come into the issue, then one could just as fairly ask Andrew why it is that Kerry, of all politicians, gets the benefit of the doubt when it comes to cynically using wedge politics. What has the Kerry campaign done to warrant a pass on this issue? John Edwards promised people in wheelchairs that John Kerry would have them walking, if only they elect him President. Mary Beth Cahill, according to reports I've read, declared Mary Cheney "fair game" in the aftermath.

To me, it's much like the Pat Buchanan anti-Semitism charge, and William F. Buckley's examination of it. In the end, even if John Kerry didn't use Mary Cheney as a political wedge against her father, his campaign to this point has made it impossible to defend him against the charge.

As to whether or not there are examples of leading Republicans expressing outrage over the issue in the past, I'll grant that if there are, I don't know of them. But, at the same time, I can't recall any previous instance approaching the high profile and stakes of this one. And, of course, the level of press scrutiny never reached this level before, so there it hasn't really been demanded. I can see where one could come to the conclusion that conservatives bury their heads in the sand when confronted with the issue, and only speak up when forced to by a hostile press. But, that's a whole other point, altogether. One in which Republicans are in no way unique, by the way.

So, even if it's true that Republicans don't protest gay-baiting with much zeal, unless there is a lot of attention being paid, that does nothing to answer the question: Did John Kerry use Mary Cheney's sex life as a wedge issue in the campaign?

The lesson Andrew draws from this is that Republicans are hostile to gay rights, except when it suits their interests to support them.

Cabana Bio

It occurred to me that now would be a good time to fill in a few blanks about myself, so that people who read might have a clearer picture of the perspective from which I arrive at my opinions, and perhaps factor that into their final judgments. It’s not meant to be a tell-all, so no lurid details are forthcoming. (That is, unless you are willing to pay a small subscription fee in exchange for weekly mailings, in which case I will gladly divulge the most degrading, dehumanizing stories I can plausibly pass off as my own.)

The basic facts are pretty simple. I’m 35, living alone, single with no kids, and a full-time office technology student at a local technical school working weekends for extra cash while trying to learn some marketable skills to help myself along the path to a possible paid writing gig sometime in the future. I haven’t lived a perfect life up to this point, having drank myself out of college the first time around, bounced from job to job following that, and eventually ending up having to make a clean slate of it all following a car accident a few years back that left me largely unable to perform most manual labor due to a crushed wrist.

I always had a minor interest in politics, even back to first grade at Mary Calcott Elementary School, in Norfolk, Virginia, where I was the only child in the class who raised his hand when asked who would vote for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter. I’ll never forget the look of puzzlement on my teacher’s face, but didn’t make much of it at the time. And, really, I guess there’s not much to be made of it, nearly 30 years down the road. Gerald Ford wasn’t the most popular man on the planet at the time.

I’m the son of a retired Navy CPO and a military housewife, the middle child among three. The formative years of my life consisted mostly of moving and making new friends, having gone to six different schools before finally settling in western Kentucky when my father retired. I was never a stellar student -- far from it, in fact. I mostly inspired a sense of “dammitboy” from teachers, who couldn’t figure out why on earth I stubbornly refused to participate in school activities, particularly homework and studying.

For the most part, my life has essentially been an exercise in finding my place in the world. Having been an unserious drunk and rudderless slacker for a good part of my life, it finally occurred to me when my uncle died at the young age of 54 this year that perhaps I ought to make some changes while I still have the chance and an opportunity. So, I went down and enrolled in a class I’d heard advertised on a local radio station. I did so with no real plan other than to shake up the direction my life has been taking over the past, oh, 20 years, or so.

How did I come to blog? Well, it’s a long, but pretty simple story. Several years ago, I found myself living at my parents’ home, once again, after having lost a job as a dealer at a nearby casino due to the presence of a certain illegal substance was detected in a random test of employees. I tried to soldier on in the grown-up world, picking up a couple of jobs and struggling to pay the bills on what little money comes in from waiting tables and working nights as a convenience store clerk. Over the next few months, I steadily sunk into a depression that I now suspect had been there to some degree for several years prior to that.

Eventually, I buckled to the stress and ended up hospitalized for a few days. After being released, I went to stay with my parents for a while, still dealing with the symptoms of generalized anxiety and all the dark, morbid thoughts that invade a mind in the throes of a clinical depression. A couple of weeks later, I returned to my apartment, only to find that the locks had been changed and everything I had was gone. At the time, I didn’t have the will, nor the desire to pursue what became of it all. Looking back on it, I still don’t. Nothing I had would have been any comfort to me at the time, nor would it be of much use to me today.

For several months, I lived in a cone of anxiety that shielded me from longtime friends, as well as strangers. I kept detailed journals of all my thoughts – largely, complaints and indictments of a world that just didn’t seem to “get” me. I avoided social settings, the thought of which filled me with a sense of dread. I stayed away from friends because I was convinced they had no idea who I was, anymore – that I had changed so much as to be unrecognizable to those who had known me for so long.

Eventually, after some cognitive therapy sessions and working hard to apply those principles to my daily life, I began to come out of the melancholy. I started working as a maintenance man for the owner of the property where my father worked. This amounted to a lot of outdoor labor, and was exactly what I needed at the time. The previous several months had left me a physical mess, having been essentially sedentary the entire stretch. After a while, I worked out all the “winter poison” – which is an extremely apt term for what sets into a person’s body during a prolonged bout with depression – and began to show the signs of a physically active person, as well as a reasonably happy person.

Then, as is often the case in similar situations, it turned out that it was probably not a good idea that I work with my father on a regular basis. There was a falling-out over the number of hours that I’d worked, which turned into a full-blown shouting match. At that point, I took a job as a cook in a local ice cream and hamburger shop and stayed there until I found a better opportunity, which came along just a few months later.

I started working on a survey crew for a civil engineering outfit that operates throughout the southeastern US. I loved the travel and the work, and got along well with the rest of the guys. To this day, it’s still the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had. The days were long, and the weather was often miserable. But, it was good, honest, and at times, physically demanding work that didn’t pay a lot, but offered something of a future.

After some time, I managed to buy myself a decent used car, and was looking forward to getting back home for a weekend so that I could finally take it out. I got back in town one Friday, and hurriedly went about all the registration and insurance business before heading out to visit with friends. Our crew had been out of town for a couple of weeks, and we were all anxious to get back home for a few days, so we left out early that morning, around 6:00 AM. In my excitement at finally being back home, it never occurred to me that I might have been shorting myself of sleep.

At about 3:00 a.m., as I was on my way home from being out with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while, I fell asleep at the wheel. The car was a total loss, and the only thing that kept me from being a total loss was the fact that my arm happened to be positioned on the steering wheel so that it would absorb the blow from my head, leaving my wrist crushed, rather than my skull. My soul came out much like my wrist.

But, after a while, they both healed. Though my wrist will never be what it was, I’m still in the process of adapting. I won’t be wielding a brush axe to clear any paths for surveying anymore. But, I’m trying to clear a different sort of path, now. And that path has led me to this blog.

While I was recovering from the various minor disasters that befell me, I found the Internet. Thank God for the Internet. Looking back, I don’t know how I would have ever found the gumption to get back on the horse without it. It was as if, suddenly, I had found a place where I could say what I believed, make an argument in favor of that belief, and not have to worry about whether or not the person I was speaking to was summing me up as nothing more than a product of consecutive failed seasons in the life of a born loser.

I’ve always considered myself to be a writer at heart. It’s the one pursuit that I’ve always felt I have an inclination toward, and there is no better place than the Internet for people like me. It opens up an entire world that was previously walled off from people like myself, who want to write and be read, but have no clue as to the inner workings of the publishing world or its markets. Industry guides, such as Writer’s Market seemed outdated by the time they hit shelves, and the very thought of submitting something to a professional editor is intimidating to a neophyte stuck in a small town in Kentucky that no one ever heard of.

So, for years, I’ve immersed myself in the Internet. I started out posting messages to UseNet newsgroups, having extended anonymous arguments with complete strangers. It wasn’t long after that when I discovered Lucianne.com, which, at the time, was a lot like the newsgroups – lawlessness and chaos. If there were rules, they were few and mostly disregarded. But, in time, it became the best political/news site on the web and I began to rely on it more and more for information, as well as an outlet for my own views.

Then, I discovered the blogosphere. I don’t even remember how, exactly, though I’m sure it was through a link at Lucianne. It piqued my interest to the degree that I made a couple of fitful starts with modest success at building a readership, but those attempts eventually faded due to a lack of overall vision for what I wanted my blog to be. But, along came Rathergate.

Now, the product of the proverbial seven years of bad luck is before your eyes in the form of The Pajama Pack. It’s been a tough road, but things are finally starting to take shape. I don’t know if this effort will ever result in anything more than my own little armchair spin alley, but if I never see a dime for my writing, it won’t be for lack of trying. And that, to me, is what conservatism is all about.

In writing about all of this, I’m sure there are people who will still sum me up as nothing more than a pajama-clad gadabout. That’s fine. I’ve seen days when much worse could have been said about me, and with some degree of accuracy. But, I’ve come a long way to get to this meager place, and it’s every bit as gratifying in its own way as a Pulitzer -- especially when I stop to think that Maureen Dowd has one of those.

Electoral meddling begets. . .

. . .a harsh rebuke from Clark County, Ohio voters, who don't appreciate foreign input. At least the folks at The Guardian had the honesty to report the response. Undoubtedly, they did so with a condescending sneer, but that's fine. Middle America is quite used to condescending sneers. We get them all the time from our own media centers on the coasts.

Sunday, October 17, 2004

A loyal Ldotter. . .

. . .passed along this great link to Communists for Kerry. There are some frighteningly creative, witty minds at work over there, so check it out. After all, with just over two weeks until Election Day, we're going to need all the laughs we can get.

George Soros. . .

. . .gets a thorough fisking on Davids Medienkritik, a fine German blog, regarding the effort to bring Democracy to the Middle East as compared to our efforts in post-WWII Germany and Japan. In fact, Soros has been so thoroughly fisked that he removed the relevant email exchange from his web site for reasons only he can explain.